Month: January 2016

This week I visited home, and it was rough. Literally nothing bad happened to me, and I had a wonderful time visiting family and friends, but I did not keep up with any of my program of sobriety, or even any physical upkeep. It was like I was in a time warp. I went to the dentist an hour after landing in Virginia Beach, got a teeth cleaning, then proceeded to not brush my teeth or wash my hair for 3 days in a row. I brought several changes of clothes, and only changed clothes twice.

I was talking to a friend this week and she was telling me about all the guys she had hooked up with. My first thought was, WHY CAN’T THAT BE ME? I immediately redownloaded Tinder, found someone that night to make out with, drove to meet him, made out (but nothing more since I’m still classy) and then drove back to where I was staying. Making out wasn’t even as fun as I thought it would be. It felt like I was back at the dentist. Thank God that was a day I had brushed my teeth and changed clothes, though. When I was leaving, he pulled a can of pepper spray from his pocket and said, “I had it in case you were crazy.” Surprisingly, this did not comfort me. I drove home and thought, “Better not do that again!”

Why did I do all that? It was like I wasn’t me, I was my alter ego, Dirty Helen. At least this is a humbling reminder that if I don’t keep up with my program, Dirty Helen will come and wreak havoc on me, even in sobriety. I must be really messed up. On the flight home, I read a bunch of stuff about recovery, while the gentleman sitting next to me ordered three jack and cokes. It was ironic, but luckily I wasn’t tempted. Mostly I just felt kind of stupid for letting Dirty Helen take me down the Tinder rabbit hole.

The weekend before I came back I drove up to Yosemite with a friend of mine from work. We stayed at an Airbnb run by a very nice 82 year old man named Larry. He told me that my coworker seemed like a really nice girl and that we should bring our kids back one day.

“Oh, we work together,” I said.

“That must be nice!” he said. “You don’t have to bring work home.”

Precious Larry.

He also told us everything he knew about the Philippines.

“I used to go up to women on the street and ask them, can I buy your baby? You know what they said? ‘How much?’ Isn’t that crazy?”

Yes Larry, it is crazy that you would ask a pregnant woman to buy her baby, regardless of whether or not you were serious.

Precious Larry.

The airbnb was also run by a Filipino woman named Marilyn, who we assumed was his wife, although she seemed to be in her 40’s or 50’s. Her mother lived there with them, an old slim woman who wandered around with a vacuum cleaner cleaning the hallways and scaring the shit out of us. She seemed closer to Larry’s age, so maybe she was his wife, but the listing said “Run by Larry and Marilyn”, so why would he run an airbnb with his daughter in law?

Maybe because, as my coworker put it, “Sex sells”. Not that Marilyn was all that sexy, but when you’re in the mountains it’s slim pickings.

I helped a new friend of mine pick up a table she had bought from someone online. We met the guy who was selling it, and he led us up to his apartment when my friend noticed the guy was wearing a college swimming shirt.

“Oh, do you swim?” She asked him.

“I used to, yeah,” he said.

“Me too. But then someone tried to drown me,” she said

“Excuse me?” I said.

“Yeah, but then I became a lifeguard, which was good. I got to save other people from drowning. Although thankfully they aren’t being forcibly drowned.”

We rode the rest of the elevator ride in silence.

I watched American Horror Story this week. I would have had my hand at writing another review, but when one character stitched her body to two other people during a heroin induced orgy, and then the other two people died, leaving her trapped between them for five days to be tortured by a demon, I thought, “Maybe I’ll sit this one out.”

Told my boss Bjork I was an alcoholic this week. Her response- “Congrats!!
Sounds good. More on this later.”

I heard a man speak this week about his friend who wound up in the hospital after a night of drinking. His exact words were,

“This guy got black out drunk and found a raccoon, and… well… there’s no other way of saying it. He tried to fuck the raccoon. He wound up in the hospital and they said ‘you don’t have a dick anymore cause you tried to get frisky with a raccoon.’ Imagine that.”

Everyone in the room was silent. I thought I might die of laughter.

On New Year’s Eve I left work with a bag carrying five grain bowls of falafel, trout, and butternut squash soup. It was a ten minute walk to my car, so I called my mother for her birthday. Halfway to my car, one of the bowls of soup had exploded, causing the bag to collapse. I left one of the bowls of soup on the sidewalk- to this day I don’t know if it is dead or alive. I carried the other four bowls, butternut squash soup dripping from my hands, as I struggled to keep my mother on the phone. When I arrived home, my shoes were covered in squash. Happy New Year.